my ramblings on life, work & anything left in-between

My first ever CPAN module!

Well it had to happen one day I suppose! Though I am amazed it took this long because been playing with the notion for some years now.

What’s ironic is that I’ve uploaded something I’ve only recently developed and not some older and more established code/modules/libraries that I have lying around. Still plenty of time for them to be dusted down and uploaded 😉

Sounds easy doesn’t it. Well it actually is easy and just looks daunting when its unknown quantity.

Before point 2 u should check that namespace is free on CPAN. With point 2 you do provide some details about the module and there could be a discussion. You can do point 3 immediately however I waited a week to see if there were any issues (mine was a root level namespace… but no one came back).

If all goes well then you module will appear on CPAN the next day (which it did!). There are tools / logs on PAUSE which provides status on you upload and if needed ways to fix some of the potential problems.

PAUSE may look “antiquated”… but it works and thats what counts.

Of course I don’t like the simple life (or rather I don’t make my life simple enough!). So instead of sticking with h2xs and subversion I decided it was time to upgrade to Module::Build and git! So I’ve learned enough of both to cause some damage and get the module onto CPAN and source code onto GitHub. Actually Module::Build (especially when used with Module::Starter) & git were really simply to pick up…. most work was just getting my head around GitHub.

Like this:

Related

As for which build system to use, I’ve tried them all — ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Build, and Module::Install. I also think it’s a damned shame that there are 3 competing standards for something as fundamental as module installation.

I went back to ExtUtils::MakeMaker. Even though it’s missing a few useful features, it seems to work for the most part. I know it’s built on hack upon hack, but even people running Windows have (miraculously) been able to install Squatting and its dependencies, so …that’s good enough for me.

About…..

My name is Barry Walsh. I'm a freelance IT consultant from London, UK. [more]

This blog is mostly about Perl programming because this is what I use and love (and occasionally hate!) for the majority of my working (and sometimes non-working) day.

Occasionally I will touch on other subjects like PostgreSQL, Mac OSX, UNIX, Linux, Ruby, jQuery, Javascript, XML and many more techie things that I also play with regularly. Other non techie aspects of my life may slip in now and again but I'll try and keep that to a minimum because its normally boring anyway :)